Letters to Lovecraft
Page 1
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
Past Reno
Only Unity Saves the Damned
______
Allochthon
Doc’s Story
The Lonely Wood
Help Me
Glimmer in the Darkness
The Order of the Haunted Wood
Only the Dead and the Moonstruck
That Place
The Horror at Castle of the Cumberland
Lovecrafting
One Last Meal, Before The End
There Has Been a Fire
The Trees
Food from the Clouds
The Semi-Finished Basement
Biographies
Letters to Lovecraft
Eighteen Whispers to the Darkness
Edited by Jesse Bullington
Published by Stone Skin Press 2014.
Stone Skin Press is an imprint of Pelgrane Press Ltd. Spectrum House, 9 Bromell’s Road, Clapham Common, London, SW4 0BN.
Each author retains the individual copyright to their story.
The collection and arrangement Copyright ©2014 Stone Skin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 978-1-908983-96-1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Printed in the USA.
This book can be ordered direct from the publisher at
www.stoneskinpress.com
Contents
Jesse Bullington Introduction
Brian Evenson Past Reno
Nadia Bulkin Only Unity Saves the Damned
Paul Tremblay ______
Livia Llewellyn Allochthon
Stephen Graham Jones Doc’s Story
Tim Lebbon The Lonely Wood
Cameron Pierce Help Me
Asamatsu Ken Glimmer in the Darkness
Jeffrey Ford The Order of the Haunted Wood
Angela Slatter Only the Dead and the Moonstruck
Gemma Files That Place
Chesya Burke The Horror at Castle of the Cumberland
Orrin Grey Lovecrafting
David Yale Ardanuy One Last Meal, Before The End
Kirsten Alene There Has Been a Fire
Robin D. Laws The Trees
Molly Tanzer Food from the Clouds
Nick Mamatas The Semi-Finished Basement
Biographies
Introduction
Jesse Bullington
We talk a lot about Lovecraft these days, far more than people ever talked about him in his own time. We talk primarily about his fiction, the rich creative legacy he left behind for readers, writers, artists, filmmakers, game designers, and other dreamers. It is debatable whether any other single horror author has left such an impact on the genre.
We also talk about Lovecraft as a person. We do so in part because he was a patient mentor and warm friend to so many other authors of weird fiction. We also do so because behind his extraordinary creatures and impossible worlds lurked a disappointingly prosaic horror: a vitriolic bigot.
While Lovecraft the man and Lovecraft the artist are both worthy topics of examination, this anthology sets its sights on a less widely discussed portion of his legacy: his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
The essay functions in part as a commendably thorough overview of Western horror prose and poetry up to the time of its authorship. Of more immediate interest, it also serves as Lovecraft’s writing manifesto, his literary philosophy. Here one finds both careful, contemplative meditations and intractable thou-shalt-nots, often grinding up against one another in the same lengthy paragraph. His cataloging of weird fiction thus does double-duty, reinforcing his claims and serving as sterling examples of his golden rules… assuming you agree with his assessment of any given work. The essay is therefore a rewarding read for anyone with a taste for the horrific and the macabre, regardless of one’s feelings on Lovecraft’s work or person.
This is not to say that “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is perfect, merely that it offers a vast wealth of material for consideration, and that certain particulars of the text elicit common responses. Who cannot help but look up from the page and ponder Lovecraft’s analysis of Edgar Allan Poe, a rare glimpse at one grandmaster’s critique of another? What modern reader doesn’t smile when Lovecraft roundly rejects notions that Percy Shelley coauthored Frankenstein? Who does not frown upon encountering his casual racial essentialism in discussing the supposed inherent nature of the fictions of various ethnic groups?
That’s our Lovecraft. At his best, he was a charming, erudite gentleman enamored with both the art and the mechanics of writing; with the romance of tradition and the advances of science. At his worst, he was as odious as any of his monstrous creations, such as when he wistfully longed in one of his letters for a cloud of poison gas to blow over New York’s Chinatown and “asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place.” There are those who question the relevancy of Lovecraft’s personal sentiments when it comes to discussions of his work… yet given the predominance of such themes as the horror of the Other and degeneration through miscegenation in his stories, it seems naïve to dismiss his prejudices as but a minor element of his thought.
That said, Lovecraft’s relentless racism, classism, sexism, and other -isms no more invalidate his literary legacy than the quality of his writing excuses his rabid subscription to eugenics. For all his warts, as an author he possessed great skill and even greater imagination. And to the contemporary writer of weird fiction, it is impossible to ignore the long, distended shadow he casts down from his spectral perch atop the gables and spires of witch-haunted Arkham. Or, you know, Providence.
Not that he seems in danger of being ignored these days. From plushy Great Old Ones to guest spots on popular cartoon shows, Lovecraft is becoming — horror of horrors! — mainstream. For all this Cthulhumania, though, how much of it actually stems from the substance of his fiction, and how much is superficial appropriation? Oh sure, godlike beings from beyond time and space look pretty cool, but what’s going on behind the wavering tentacles? Is the extent of Lovecraft’s legacy a few public-domain monsters?
Of course not. In “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft offers us a continuing contribution to horror that is just as thought provoking and inspiring as any of his individual stories. If this were all that Lovecraft had left us, we would still feel his weighty impression bearing down on generations of writers.
To some extent, writing is always a dialogue with one’s literary predecessors. Authors push and pull against everything and everyone that came before, engaging both their enemies and their heroes. This writerly exchange can be painfully overt or deftly subtle, depending on the author. The goal of this project is to make the literary conversation even more direct, but not by assembling a collection of essays responding to Lovecraft’s. Nor will this be an anthology composed solely of new Mythos stories, or, shudder, Lovecraft pastiche — no, the purpose here is to compile a collection of artistic responses to Lovecraft’s ethos, in the form of original fiction.
To that end, I asked eighteen of my favorite storytellers to read the essay and select a particular passage that resonated with them. Each then wrote an original story inspired by whatever quote they chose. Several of these literary responses were an affirmation of some claim made by Lovecraft that the author found particularly profound or representative of their own approach to f
iction. For others, their story serves as a rejection of a passage that they disagree with. Often it’s a little bit of both. Each story opens with the quote that triggered it, followed by a brief introduction from the author.
Some of these authors are already established in the cottage industry that is modern Mythos fiction. Others have never ventured into that non-Euclidean sandbox. Hell, I knew that a few of the authors were not even fond of Lovecraft’s fiction, but, again, I believe this essay to be indispensable reading for any working writer of weird fiction. What these artists delivered runs the gamut from white-knuckle weirdness in the woods to avant-garde apocalypses; from the bizarre to the beautiful; from a quiet paean in praise of darkness to a raging howl against the cold impartiality of the stars — sometimes all in the space of a dozen pages. This is what happens when you ask modern masters to engage with Lovecraft not by revamping or expanding on his fiction, but by cutting straight to the heart of his philosophy.
Something I was curious to see as the stories began trickling in was if and when overlap would occur. Not just thematically or content-wise, as is the case with all anthologies, but in terms of which Lovecraft quotes the authors selected. Would I end up with eighteen stories responding to the essay’s most popular passage: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”?
No. There is a little overlap, as several authors did focus on the same excerpt, but always to wildly different results. Not a single author settled on the aforementioned quote, perhaps because I scared them off it with my ranting, or perhaps because they recognized that there was much more to mine from the essay than its famous opening line. I suspect any parallels you find in the following stories will be every bit as intriguing as the divergences.
For his “Past Reno” and her “That Place,” Brian Evenson and Gemma Files both engaged with a particular quote that could be taken in almost any imaginable direction, and yet both stories deal with adults returning to their childhood homes to settle their parents’ estates. Evenson’s tale is all about the journey back, an increasingly disquieting drive through the wastelands of the desert and the mind. Files’s story, on the other hand, concerns itself with the arrival, as three siblings return home to their deceased parents’ remote house in the forests of Canada. Both stories deal in fractured memories and fracturing realities, but are fundamentally at odds with one another: one ends where the other begins, so to speak. The strange synchronicity at play between the stories became more and more indicative of the project as a whole, the further I read…
Intriguingly, the passage from which Angela Slatter took her inspiration for “Only the Dead and the Moonstruck” overlaps with that of Files but not that of Evenson. While the aforementioned stories involve the homecoming of children, Slatter’s focal point is the disintegration of any real sense of home when a child is taken from a family. Far more explicit in its Mythos lineage, Slatter’s piece is nevertheless delicate as a fresh bruise as she weaves together overt Mythos monstrousness with the sort of honest, raw emotion that was as alien to most of Lovecraft’s fiction as any Yuggothian fungus.
Three authors selected a quote asserting “the true weird tale” requires “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” Nadia Bulkin’s “Only Unity Saves the Damned” certainly makes a compelling case for this argument. She deftly parallels the cosmic futility that exemplifies Lovecraftian horror with the grim inevitability of growing up in a small town where few can escape the social gravity well and move away. Robin D. Laws’s historical maritime tragedy “The Trees” likewise proves the rule as we sail from a commonplace calamity in England to far weirder shores in a remote quadrant of the Pacific, but there is another unexpected, inexplicable connection to Bulkin’s found footage… And then there is Paul Tremblay, whose “______” cheekily bites her oddly familiar thumb at Lovecraft’s claim as we join a bored father overseeing his kids’ swim lesson at a suburban lakefront. Yet as our narrator is joined by a perhaps too-welcome visitor, curious clouds begin to edge in around the easy, sunny atmosphere, and despite the obvious differences we begin to sense points of intersection between Tremblay’s tale and those of Bulkin and Laws.
Jeffrey Ford and Chesya Burke both selected a charming quote regarding the fertility rites of “a squat race of [pre-Aryan] Mongoloids.” Ford focuses his deadeye on the notion of the “hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers,” and delivers a wild ride through the history of a very particular sect: “The Order of the Haunted Wood.” What begins as an amusing, absurdist romp takes on an air of inexplicable menace as the boner jokes begin to wilt and the atmosphere grows thick as intoxicating smoke spewing from a cultist’s censer. Burke, on the other hand, settles on the casual racism of Lovecraft’s quote, meeting the bitter WASP on his familiar stomping ground of eugenic thought with “The Horror at Castle of the Cumberland.” The horror found in her period piece is not Lovecraft’s favorite blend of polluted bloodlines and physical degeneration, nor does it lie on the intrusion of the supernatural into the mundane, though she is able to execute the latter with an expert hand. Rather, our dread wells up in response to the everyday sadism and hypocrisy of ordinary people in a small Southern town at the turn of the last century, demonstrating that depending on the interpretation, any faith can be as cruel as the worship of the Old Ones.
Given the sheer breadth of Lovecraft’s essay, it is hardly surprising that most of the contributors chose quotes that did not overlap with anyone else’s. Some went with a brief, concise supposition, such as Cameron Pierce’s selection. His wry “Help Me” opens with the perfect lure for readers of Lovecraftiana — a man fishing on a desolate stretch of beach, what could possibly go wrong? — then sets the hook with his easy yet exact style, reeling you in with the inescapable awfulness that you almost saw coming, but didn’t. It’s a fish story to end all fish stories, and will either put you off seafood for good or send you straight down to the shore, tackle box in tow. Others went for airier excerpts, for instance, Livia Llewellyn’s choice to open up her “Allochthon.” Airy, though, is categorically not the word for her intense, richly rendered requiem for a woman suffocating in her seemingly humdrum life, a life that won’t let her go; any air here is the toxic fume belching up from subterranean vaults. Pack a picnic basket and squeeze into the backseat, because we’re all going on a trip to Beacon Rock you’ll never forget.
There is a brooding philosophy at play in Lovecraft’s work, and while the above stories dip in and out of it to various depths, few seem as downright eager as Nick Mamatas to plunge in and root around until he finds something overlooked… or perhaps heretofore avoided for a reason. Sharing baked goods and theories in “The Semi-Finished Basement” are a motley crew of four individuals far too realistically rendered to belong in any Lovecraft story, yet, in the end, he delivers a bitter draught that one could certainly accept as the “concentrated essence” of his inspiration. If Mamatas directs a microscope at the Mythos, Tim Lebbon calibrates a telescope toward entirely different systems. In “The Lonely Wood,” we join an atheist in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in mourning, in turmoil, and, quite possibly, in danger. Grief is a recurring theme in the collection, perhaps because losing someone we love is the sharpest fear many of us feel, and Lebbon brilliantly capitalizes on the all-consuming nature of it: a personal, private apocalypse can overshadow anything, shaking the faith of believers and rattling the conviction of doubters.
Orrin Grey and Asamatsu Ken both make the potentially catastrophic decision to tell stories where Lovecraft himself plays a role, but through their skill and originality manage to pull it off. Grey’s “Lovecrafting” starts off on a familiar course before sharply veering us away from the over-traveled Lovecraft’s-stories-were-real route, and the novel telling of the piece dovetails perfectly with the cinematic scope. It’s a monster mash as only Grey can deliver, and never overstays its welcome or overplays
its hand. Asamatsu’s “Glimmer in the Darkness” rows us even further into those dangerous literary waters, with our young protagonist none other than Lovecraft himself. What’s more, the story takes the title of this anthology literally, with Lovecraft’s letters playing a role in the denouement. With an expert’s finesse, Asamatsu imbues his story not with the expected over-the-top antics found in most stories where Lovecraft shows up, but instead cultivates an eerie weirdness that is all the more disquieting for its restraint.
Restraint is decidedly off the table in David Yale Ardanuy’s “One Last Meal, Before the End.” Using Lovecraft’s analysis of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Windigo” as a starting point, Ardanuy catapults us back to the final days of the 18th century, when an unexpected visitor arrives at a remote trading post. If you think you’ve had this particular meal before, you’re in for a delicious surprise, as Ardanuy bastes the choicest historical details with icy dread, hot-blooded action, and a healthy pinch of the grotesque. Balancing out Ardanuy’s eager willingness to peel back the frozen sod and show us everything wriggling underneath is Kirsten Alene, whose beguilingly sedate “There Has Been a Fire” operates on the logic of an opiate-addled fever dream rather than a nightmare. Alene opens her story of an aging professor of poetry with a quote from Lovecraft on the nature of verse, yet despite the slippery nature of the lyrical prose we never quite lose our footing… much as we think we might like to. Imagine the professors from Gormenghast holding a parent-teacher conference with Edward Gorey over the disruptive behavior of his daughter, and you’re approaching the deliciously musty essence of the piece.
Then there is “Doc’s Story,” Stephen Graham Jones’s shitkicker of a werewolf legend that sinks its canines into a Lovecraft passage meditating on the evolution of horrific storytelling from oral tradition to literary fiction. For all his obsessions with men becoming monsters and devolving into animals, Lovecraft himself never came within howling distance of a lycanthrope, but what really sets Jones’s beast apart from the oeuvre of his inspiration is the human heart pounding underneath the fur. Jones demonstrates with understated brilliance and wit that while Lovecraft may have been a master at instilling readers with fear and wonder, he was far less skilled at actually making us feel for his characters. Perhaps this is something that really sets the modern weird tale apart from its predecessors, for, of all the differences between Lovecraft and the crew assembled here, one element that reasserts itself again and again is the emotional connection to the characters, be they doomed, saved, or everything in between.